Astronomers needed a telescope the size of Earth to image the monster black hole at the center of the Milky Way – and next time they tackle the continuing observations, they’ll have help from NASA’s next-generation observatory in space. The James Webb Space Telescope, also known as JWST or Webb, launched in December 2021 and … Read more
Simulation of glowing gas around a black hole ‘Credit: Chris White, Princeton University Looks can be deceiving. The light from an incandescent bulb seems steady, but it actually flickers 120 times per second. Because the brain only perceives an average of the information it receives, this flickering is blurred and the perception of constant illumination … Read more
Black holes are the most massive gravitational engines in the universe, yet what most of us probably know about them could fit into a thimble. A new collaboration of music, art, and science by the Multiverse Concert Series offers an opportunity to learn a lot more about these mysteries of the cosmos. As part of … Read more
An artist’s impression of a fast-expanding supermassive black hole from far away. (Image credit: Shutterstock) (opens in new tab) Astronomers have detected the brightest and fastest-growing black hole to have existed in the last 9 billion years. The enormous cosmic entity is 3 billion times more massive than the sun and swallows up an Earth-size … Read more
Scientists have spotted the first ever rogue black hole wandering our galaxy. Using the Hubble Space Telescope, the team not only detected the rogue object, but also directly measured its mass – something researchers have only been able to infer in the past. The stellar-mass black hole is located around 5,000 light-years from Earth in … Read more
A supermassive black hole growing so fast it shines 7,000 times brighter than the entire Milky Way has just been found, hiding in plain sight. Every second, an amount of material equivalent to the mass of Earth falls into this insatiable black hole. As far as we know, it’s the fastest-growing black hole of the … Read more
A solitary celestial object – more massive than the sun, yet far smaller – is wandering the galaxy a few thousand light-years from Earth. It might be the first isolated stellar-mass black hole to be detected in the Milky Way. Or it might be one of the heaviest neutron stars known. The interstellar wanderer first … Read more
The first detection of what appears to be a rogue black hole drifting through the Milky Way, revealed earlier this year, just got important validation. A second team of scientists, conducting a separate, independent analysis, has reached almost the same finding, adding weight to the idea that we’ve potentially identified a rogue black hole wandering … Read more
A rogue black hole wandering the space lanes of our Milky Way galaxy alone could be the smallest black hole yet found, according to one estimate of its mass. Earlier this year, astronomers led by Kailash Sahu of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, announced the discovery of the first known isolated stellar-mass … Read more
Black holes, by their nature, are invisible unless part of a stellar binary or surrounded by an accretion disk. Most stellar-sized black holes aren’t, but astronomers have been searching for them through gravitational microlensing events, where the black hole brightens and distorts light from stars toward the galactic center. A UC Berkeley-led team may have … Read more